The best cure for January blues

It was January 6 and I was in search of an epiphany. Is that too much to ask? I swing violently just now between wanting to feel everything and wanting to feel nothing at all ever again. I was clearly having a feel everything day. To be perfectly frank, I was missing the Christmas tree — a bit of Broadway in the corner of the room. The glamour of it. The lights. I missed that very un-English declaration the tree seemed to make to me each morning, each evening, that “Something’s coming, something good...”

What’s coming now? Burns Night? I love “Thir breeks o’mine, my only pair/That ance were plush o’guid blue hair” — washed down with a slab of haggis even — but it cannot compete with Christmas, not really. Valentine’s Day? Don’t be silly. It’s lovely, sure, and quite glamorous when you can see a crescent moon out of the window as you have your breakfast early, but it isn’t quite the same. Spring’s the next big thing to hope for, I guess, but who has that kind of patience? Blossom can be so withholding when you want it mid-January.

In this sort of mood, the best cure is actual New York but, as that isn’t possible, I went to Piccadilly, for I had heard that the son of Harold Arlen, composer of “Over the Rainbow”, “Stormy Weather”, “One for my Baby (and One More for the Road)”, “Get Happy”, and many other songs I love was doing a cabaret show. I suggested it to a couple of friends who were a bit “I’d love to come but we have a new hamster,” so I went alone.

I could sit in a chair at a little table on my own, with a whisky sour for company, bending the ear of the barman like a character in a Harold Arlen song. As long as I looked cheerful and not at all like the Lady of Shalott, it would be fine. I was excited.

At the moment I like jumping out of a hot bath and going out into the cool night in a dress and red legs and no coat. Where’s the harm? (Pneumonia aside.) All my senses were heightened. The slap of cold (and it isn’t that cold, so it was less a slap and more the cold rolling its eyes at me) felt so good. Piccadilly looked soft and fair of face. I spied a couple kissing in a doorway near the Ritz. Romance was in the air. I was being quite courtly with myself, practically saying, “If I may make so bold” as each thought floated through my mind; or “No no no, after you” as I walked through the heavy glass door and went down the steps to the Crazy Coqs. I took my seat, nodded “hello” to some familiar faces, ordered a drink and got out a pen and notebook to give myself a professional air.

Sam Arlen on saxophone and his singing pianist who had a look of the Cowardly Lion took us through Harold Arlen’s songbook, a body of work of great variety and wit and pathos, showing its roots in Blues and in the religious music of his father’s childhood. There were charming stills of Mr and Mrs Arlen, projected on to a screen, him suave yet modest in well-cut tweeds and her brimming with truth and beauty, in platinum curls, at home or at an opening or premiere or in a New York Street scene.

There were home movies that Arlen senior had taken on the set of The Wizard of Oz, the most touching of which was Margaret Hamilton, the Wicked Witch of the West, laughing and smiling, soft and kind, leaving her evil devilry to one side for a moment, during a break. I once heard her tell a story against herself on television about the day her agent telephoned her to say she was wanted for the film of The Wizard of Oz and she was delighted, for it was her favourite book as a child. Breathlessly she asked him which part it was and when he said, “The Witch”, she exclaimed with disappointment, “The Witch?!” and he replied, “What else?”

I hate it when that happens.

My favourite part of the show came near the end when Sam Arlen described one strange day in New York City in April 1986, where all day long there were rainbows in the sky, everywhere you looked. People rang the New York Times asking “what’s with all the rainbows suddenly”; they called the weather channels and the radio stations asking the same question.

It was the day his father, the composer of “Over the Rainbow”, had died, Sam Arlen said with love and pride.

I closed my eyes for a moment.

— Financial Times